Clever Caviar wrote on Jan 10, 2014, 18:10:I find EA's attitude towards gamers...astonishing. Truly they view any and all as just peons they can do what they wish with.

Considering people still buy their shit, they'd be right. They release broken games loaded with DLC and still people throw money at them time after time. Why would they give a fuck what the peons think?

Scheherazade wrote on Jan 8, 2014, 14:56:I would grudgingly give up ~$300 for a 1/2 1080p HMD. (knowing I would try it out just for kicks, then put it on a shelf and never use it again. It'd be money to burn.)But I would happily give up ~$1000 for a full 1440p HMD. (knowing that it would get used all the time, and I'd get my money's worth)

The rumor is that Valve is developing an HMD prototype as well, but their goal is not how to make it possible for consumers, but rather to show off what is possible. Their target budget isn't $300, it's $whateverYouNeed. Hopefully they show that off at their Steam Dev Days thing next week and we can hear some feedback on it.

I'm with you, though. I'd much rather drop a grand on a really good Rift instead of an okay cheaper Rift. And I don't doubt that some day that will be possible. They're being extremely careful with the launch, so I hope it works out. I'd love VR to stay.

Wesp5 wrote on Jan 3, 2014, 12:08:Maybe this was intended as some kind of warning to Valve, which is planning to conquer the living room with their Steamboxes when they can't even keep Steam running under stress. Or at online DRM at all, which is generally a bad idea as these situations show...

Meh, couldn't play the Brothers game due to the cloud being offline. But most of my other single-player games worked just fine. I agree though, this shows that online DRM sucks. I was more annoyed that I couldn't see the status of my friends.

I'd pay to bring an alt to 90. What I'd prefer, though, is that they throw Elixir of Arcane Knowledge on more rares. It gives you a 300% boost to XP for an hour. It's great for leveling alts, but only drops from one rare and has a shit drop rate (like 10%).

As for the annual pass, I signed up for that last time because they included Diablo. I'm not sure I'd do the same for WoD. Give me a guaranteed beta slot for Titan and they'd have a deal.

Or Warcraft 4. I predict Jaina is going to go crazy and become the next villain for an RTS. Calling it now.

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Dec 22, 2013, 13:18:I have stuff in my steam library I know I will never get around to playing, let alone finishing.

I had/have this problem also. A couple months ago, I decided to go through my entire library and give each game I haven't played at least 10 minutes. After getting through A-C games, I realized something. There's a LOT of really bad games out there. And I paid money for them. Someday I will finish my quest of playing them all.

nin wrote on Dec 20, 2013, 09:53:The part of the beta I played was fun, until you get to the grind. After that, I lost interest.

Same here. I enjoyed my first few hours with it, but then lost interest. I'd do the bot games more if there was a reason to. They don't count towards dailies, and getting gold from them is just a grind.

Cutter wrote on Dec 17, 2013, 23:22:If they had permission then there wouldn't be any claims, would there? That means the content owners would be cutting off an extra revenue source. I think it's you who needs to brush up the facts, champ.

You missed the part where it's all YouTube's automated bot, not the content owners. Blizzard and a few other big publishers are trying to mass-allow everything but haven't been able to. One guy was doing a video of his own game with his own music, and it was removed for copyright claims. The content identification bot isn't working.

I play against bots. If you play on the lower levels, you seldom get people yelling at you. It can happen in the harder bot levels, but it's so rare these days. As said above, there are a lot of tools these days to make it better.

For anyone who is interested, I suggest loading a character up with a build and doing an easy bot match. You can browse builds other people have made, and use those so you know what to buy and what skills to advance as you level. Makes it a lot easier until you know what you're doing (it highlights them in game so you don't even have to hunt for them).

They added Wraith Night also, so you can play a map that's like Man vs. Machine (from TF2). Overall I'm enjoying it.

I played the Arma II version when it first came out. Other players were more of a threat than the zombies. I recall them removing any sort of negative punishment for killing other players, to make it more realistic. Is that still the case?

Jensen wrote on Dec 13, 2013, 22:54:I found this image that shows a rough approximation of what the 1280*800 LCD looks like inside the devkit. Note the text at the top of the image: "this is how far from the screen you should be"

Yep, that looks about right. Not nearly that dark though (maybe the person who made it didn't have their contrast turned up). If the UI isn't built for the Rift, text can be nearly impossible to read on the dev kit. In HL2 during that first water scene where you swim around while the enemy drops flaming barrels on you, it can be difficult to see much detail on them. There is the screen-door, also, but that kind of vanishes after a while.

Anytime I show someone the Rift, I warn them before hand that the resolution on the dev version is shit. I'm looking forward to buying the HD one, though.

theyarecomingforyou wrote on Dec 13, 2013, 13:52:For it to work with FPS games the aim will have to be independent of the motion tracking. At the moment they've demoed it with the controller being able to move the camera as well as the head tracking, which looks like a nightmare.

TF2 has options to decouple the head movement from the aiming/walking. You can basically fire in one direction while looking in another. Personally I can't handle this mode. I use the "look at it and it dies" mode where the aiming is tied to the head. It's a lot more comfortable to me since I'm used to that in FPS games anyway. I think it's just a matter of getting used to the other way though.

Creston wrote on Dec 13, 2013, 13:06:I wonder if taking dramamine would help. But in any case, yeah, it just seems a normal bodily reaction to any kind of motion that's ... out-of-sync (so to speak).

According to the Oculus forums on Reddit, it can help. I eat ginger cookies and drink ginger ale (the ginger ale helps a lot). It sounds like most people eventually just get used to it until one day you notice you're not getting sick anymore. In fact, they've said that around Oculus, they have a bit of trouble finding people to test some of the setups because none of them are getting sick anymore, so they had trouble determining if changes they're making are helping or not.

Squirmer wrote on Dec 12, 2013, 22:06:Beta access for the Kickstarter was at $75 or more, so I guess early access will be that expensive? I pledged $50, so I'll be kind of annoyed if I don't get beta access but late backers do via early access.

Exactly this. I don't understand why this is so hard for people to grasp. I pledge the amount I do not to successful fund a game (which is usually already funded when I get to it), but to get in to the beta. If I could get in to the same beta and save myself $50, I sure as hell wouldn't back any more kickstarters for the same company.

NS2 is a great game... when it all works out. I stopped playing because finding two good commanders (one for each team) was a pain in the ass. Same reason I gave up on S2's Savage. But when you do get in to those games, it's a lot of fun. So rare though.

And yeah, I could jump in and command, but fuck that. I get enough stress from my wife, don't need more.

Ratty wrote on Dec 1, 2013, 14:59:Skyrim must have raked in a buttload of cash for Bethesda by now. I hope so. Maybe now they can afford to make a friggin PC UI for ES VI.

My fear is that ESO will do to TES like what WoW did to Warcraft. That is, I'm afraid ESO might kill further TES games. That'd be a damn shame. After playing the MMO version, I went back to Skyrim and have started racking up the time again.

jdreyer wrote on Nov 25, 2013, 14:55:What they need is some kind of ranking system for both reviews and reviewers. That way the cream can float to the head of the class. It's not rocket surgery.

There's a "was this helpful" button on the reviews. Maybe that'll float the cream. They turned the recommendations in to reviews, so a lot of them (like mine) were short one-liners. Hope to see more from this system.